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R E C E N T L Y

21st briefing
By Scott Rosenberg
Feds 1, Microsoft 0 -- but the game's only started
(12/12/97)

License to code
By Greg Lindsay
Universities experiment with ways to cash in on software research
(12/12/97)

Let's Get This Straight
By Scott Rosenberg
Drudge falls for Yahoo hackers' nonsense
(12/11/97)

The girl-game jinx
By Elizabeth Weil
Can selling computer games to girls be reduced to a science?
(12/10/97)

E.D., phone home!
By Scott Rosenberg
Esther Dyson talks about Microsoft, the Net, Russia and more
(12/09/97)

Technocracy in America
By Andrew Leonard
A review of "Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century" by G. Pascal Zachary
(12/08/97)

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BROWSE THE
21ST ARCHIVES

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HOW THE MIND WORKS | BY STEVEN PINKER | W.W. NORTON | 660 PAGES

BY THOMAS LEWIS | From the Darwinian perspective, life is a fierce competition with one rule: Eat others and reproduce before you are eaten. The genes of the winners pass to the next generation, and there is no prize for second place. What this continuous strife produces (aside from books by Stephen Jay Gould) is the diversity of the biosphere. Stingers, claws, fur and feathers are merely genetic devices for making it to the next mating season.

Enter evolutionary psychology, the latest school to take a crack at understanding people. Evolutionary psychologists consider the human mind another product of this battle for survival, as finely shaped for its purpose as a gull's graceful wing or a shark's razor-sharp teeth. The movement's adherents focus on how aspects of the mind reflect ancient survival strategies, and how the exigencies of past ages predispose contemporary humans to act, think and feel the way we do.

Now Steven Pinker, the MIT psycholinguist who wowed readers with the bestselling "The Language Instinct" in 1994, offers "How the Mind Works," a comprehensive compendium of evolutionary psychology. Pinker's last book argued that language is not an artifact of culture but a biological imperative, transmitted in the genes that build the human brain. "How the Mind Works" applies that neo-Darwinian thesis on a grander scale to every bit of human nature.

"The mind is a system of organs of computation, designed by natural selection to solve the kinds of problems our ancestors faced in their foraging way of life -- in particular, understanding and outmaneuvering objects, animals, plants, and other people," Pinker writes. That's what his book sets out to prove. Along the way, though, he lapses into a fevered attempt to make his disquisition explain more than it can.

Dominant models of the mind (most famously the Freudian) were formulated without a scrap of attention paid to how the brain evolved and the kinds of problems it was meant to solve. Correcting that flaw was long overdue, and for much of "How the Mind Works," Pinker's case is convincing and entertaining. It makes sense that a considerable fraction of why we are the way we are is attributable to our evolutionary heritage. People readily fear snakes, spiders, heights and enclosed spaces -- once common killers that are now statistically uncommon causes of death. At the same time, modern humans have the greatest difficulty mustering anxiety about the things that actually do threaten their lives: drinking and driving, smoking cigarettes, eating corn dogs.

The neural machinery that evolved to serve hunter-gatherers lives on inside each of us, and it confounds our lives in surprising ways. Take the differences between the genders. Because a man can reproduce frequently, he can create more children who carry his genes by spreading his seed a little wider than monogamy permits. Because a woman can reproduce only at several-year intervals, she ought to make sure that the male contributor to procreation has good genes and some inclination to stick around afterward. So evolutionary psychologists predict that we should find men on the whole friendlier to promiscuity than women, and women vastly more selective about their sexual partners than men. And so it appears -- not a cultural residue, say Pinker and his ilk, not the result of social indoctrination, but a fundamental, never-to-be-purged genetic difference based on eons of successful reproduction.

N E X T_P A G E | Lobbing bombs at the culture-is-everything schools of feminism, sociology and anthropology